


scenes from an intergalactic war

by Scribe



Category: Planeshift Fictional TV Series Campaign
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Vignettes, aggressive lack of plot, apparently I'm writing this now, everything is better IN SPACE, seriously there is neither plot nor porn, unexpected tropes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-09 01:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13471305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: Sometimes Dyr feels like the only one of them who was born planetside.





	1. Prologue: Dyr

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feedingonwind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feedingonwind/gifts).



> I'm afraid I couldn't wrestle this into an actual space story, so here are some space scenes, loosely connected by their utter lack of arc plot. 
> 
> A million thanks to fiercynn, who gamely beta'd this thing under deadline pressure, while I was still writing it, and without any context whatsoever.

Sometimes Dyr feels like the only one of them who was born planetside. It isn’t remotely true- all of them were except Elliwick, station brat through and through, and Zeth, who debatably wasn’t born at all- but for the rest of them it seems to hardly matter, just happenstance of their histories. They were all meant for space.

Dyr is the only one who stumbles over _a K8V-ii class star_ or even the more familiar _Pelea_ because she still thinks of it as simply _the sun_ , definite article telling in its narrow-mindedness. The others get cabin fever in the claustrophobic in the confines of the ship sometimes, get antsy on long hauls, but Dyr is the only one who lives with that tense wrongness that lodges just between her shoulderblades, the certainty that people were meant to live with their feet on the ground.

Nobody expects it of her. Most people she meets assume that she’s a lifelong spacer (it’s the arm, and the leg, though it’s rare enough for acquaintances to see the latter). The stereotypes say that space is for the innovators, the geniuses and adventurers, and planets are for colonizers and their descendants- staid, provincial, concerned with stability and tradition. Out here no one sees the delicate, intricate, ingenious marvel of engineering that is her arm and thinks that it might have been made planetside.

(“How do they think planets even work?” Dyr demands one day, after gritting her teeth through a meet with a contact who turns out to be the smuggest kind of spacer.

“As far as I can tell, they don’t think about it at all,” says Asmun. “Bet he’s never even been in a land-based port.”

“Probably thinks they’re all like those reenactment cities,” says Gwinna.

“Wait, you mean you guys didn’t spend your childhoods building retro stone walls around your libraries and crying over the slow decline of unadulterated nature?” says Elliwick. Dyr’s almost positive that she’s joking.)

It doesn’t matter, not really. Not with the way things are. She would have given up much more than land under her boots for this fight (she _will_ give up much more, before it’s over). She hasn’t looked back since the day she woke up Knowing, since she left the council meeting sick with fury and helplessness and Skjaldi caught her shoulder and said, low and resolute,

“I found us a ship.”

“It’s just us,” Dyr had said, and Skjaldi had paused for only half a step to take in the news.

“Well,” she said. “We’d better learn to pilot it fast, then.”

In the end, the basic controls weren’t that different from the in-atmo shuttles they were both licensed for, and the ship had a helpful enough AI interface when they could get it to respond. Dyr had enough attention to spare to watch Stonlum receding behind them, and then Pelea, too, and she’d known well enough that she might never see them again. There was no question in her mind that they were doing the right thing. The only thing, once they Knew.

 

Still. Deep down, in her bones and blood and gears, Dyr belongs on a planet. The elegant machinery of her is meant to be powered by the sun, _the_ sun, in the endless bright day of tidal-locked Stonlum. When Lowen comes on board she tinkers with a light panel so it emits the exact right wavelength and luminance to mimic Pelea’s rays through Stonlum’s atmosphere, and after that Dyr never has trouble with her limbs- when she remembers to spend enough time under it, at least. But the panel light never dims behind clouds or dapples through leaves, never melts its way slowly through the freezing morning fog that she may never see again (she will see it again, exactly once. That might be crueler.) Her arm is in perfect working order but sometimes when she looks out at the swallowing black all around them, at the utterly incomprehensible distance, it aches down to the core with a cold she can’t shake.

(She doesn’t regret any of it, but with the black all around her, boots on nothing but thin metal and emptiness, sometimes her heart aches too.)


	2. One: Skjaldi

Skjaldi is reading.

It’s early days, just a few of them on the ship, bouncing from rumor to emergency beacon with long stretches of black in between, driven a little mad by Knowing but not _knowing_ anything about what they’re facing. Aja hasn’t found them yet, so the only information they have to go on is what they can synthesize themselves. Lowen and Gwinna spend time poring over scientific journals and compiling whatever data they can skim- legally or not- from the monitoring stations they pass.

Skjaldi goes for the stories. She’s always loved stories, which is good, because she’s amassing a list of them to investigate at a ridiculous rate. Most origin planets have a myriad of mythologies, colonies their own, and a whole new set of stories about the deep circulate through the ports and the spacer crews. All of them are riddled with catastrophic environmental changes, people and planets mysteriously swallowed by the black, inexplicable failures of technology and physics and whole civilizations. If it wasn’t for the Knowing driving her Skjaldi would have gotten sidetracked immediately. As it is, she’s keeping a list of languages and folklores to study someday that’s longer than the list of actual information she’s been able to piece together.

So, Skjaldi is reading when a sudden impact shakes the ship. Dyr, napping after a shift at the helm, nearly falls off her bunk and comes up wild-eyed.

“What was that?” she demands.

“Apologies,” says Elliot from the nearby speaker, pleasantly modulated as always. “No need for alarm. Recalculating trajectory now.”

Another impact jars them just as the speaker clicks off. Skjaldi and Dyr exchanged a look and run for the helm.

When they get there Lowen’s in the pilot’s chair, frowning at the viewscreen, and Elliwick’s arguing with the AI.

“I’m sure we can figure out what it is, but not if we keep running into asteroids,” she says. “Just stop, and keep an eye on the drift.”

“What’s going on?” says Dyr, just as Gwinna comes running in behind them.

“Are we under attack?” she asks.

“Only by an asteroid field,” says Lowen, flicking the viewscreen to project for all of them. “I was letting Elliot handle it, it’s nothing weird, but suddenly we started running into things.”

“Any idea what happened?” asks Dyr. Lowen shrugs.

“Elliot, can you run a diagnostic?” she says.

“All systems in acceptable condition,” reports the AI immediately.

“Elliot, analyze impulse, mechanics, and external forces, in that order,” says Elliwick. There’s a short pause.

“I require trials to complete analysis.”

“Will the trials run us into anything the shields can’t handle?”

“It is extremely unlikely.”

“Go for it,” says Elliwick, and grabs onto the back of the pilot chair. “You guys might want to hang on, just in case.”

“Why does Elliot always listen to you?” Skjaldi grouses, grabbing a handhold as the ship starts to accelerate. Her own record for getting anything useful out of Elliot can’t be better than fifty percent.

“The whole station ran on AI,” says Elliwick. “You just have to get the knack for talking to them.”

“I’ve copied the exact commands you use, word for word!”

Elliwick just shrugs.

“I believe I have located the problem,” says Elliot. “There must be some kind of blockage in my right rear thruster. The mechanism is in perfect working condition, but the output is slightly less than its counterpart, which is causing my trajectory to deviate from the expected course.”

“That does sound like a problem,” says Dyr. “Can we fix it?”

Silence.

“Elliot, how do we repair the blockage?” says Elliwick, knocking on the wall.

“Not recommended in current conditions,” says Elliot. “Someone will have to perform a direct visual inspection of the thruster, which requires a spacewalk that would be quite dangerous here.”

“Great,” says Dyr. “Gwinna, do you think you can get us out of here any more smoothly than Elliot was managing?’

“Being an astronomer is not actually the same as being a pilot, you know,” says Gwinna, but she takes a step forward to study the projected asteroid field anyway.

“I know,” says Dyr, “but you’re the best we’ve got.”

 

Skjaldi stays up at the helm to watch Gwinna steer them to open space, which she does without a single hitch, despite her protests (this has nothing to do with her background in astronomy, but it will be a long time before she shares that secret with anyone). On the other side of the asteroid field she lets them drift to a stop, rolling tension out of her shoulders and grinning.

“All clear,” she says over the intercom. Skjaldi can hear the other three cheering faintly; it’s not that big a ship, when it comes down to it.

It’s early days, so early, long before Asmun, so Lowen and Elliwick are the closest thing they have to actual techs. Lowen actually understands some basic engineering, but Elliwick is the one the AI likes the best. This is her sole qualification, but it’s an important one, and it’s why she’s the one who ends up on the hull of the ship with clamp boots and a tether, grumbling over the radio while she tries to dislodge debris from the malfunctioning thruster.

This is when the entire ship shudders onces again.

“What did you _do_?” says Lowen, who’s been monitoring the readout from inside.

“Wasn’t me,” says Elliwick. “Felt like it came from the helm. Please tell me we didn’t find more asteroids somehow.”

Sjkaldi, taking her shift in the pilot’s seat, sets the viewscreen to scan surrounding space and immediately freezes. There’s a ship looming out of the black in front of them, enormous and impassive and utterly terrifying, the gaudy emblem of a marilith shedding an eerie light over the hull. This is not the kind of battle they can engage in, let alone win; their little ship barely even has a weapon to speak of. Skjaldi’s hands are unsteady as she reaches out to hit the all-ship broadcast button.

“It’s not asteroids,” she says. “It’s pirates. Elliwick, get in here _now_.”

Another blast rattles the ship as she finishes. Skjaldi can see it on the screen a split second before it hits. This is no stealth attack; the entire point of the other ship, armed to the teeth and spitting searing red light across the black between them, is to intimidate.

“I don’t know what kind of weapon that is,” says Lowen, sounding shaken, “but it’s doing way too much damage. I’d say we can only withstand four, maybe five more hits like that.”

“What about the shields? I thought we had shields!” demands Gwinna.

“That’s _with_ the shields!”

“Okay, okay, everybody keep your heads. I’m heading for the airlock,” says Dyr. Skjaldi can hear her footsteps echoing faintly; they’re all on shipwide radio now. “Skjaldi, see if you can get them to talk, I don’t care what you say, but buy us some time.”

She sends a hail, though it goes unacknowledged, as she knew it would. Sjkaldi isn’t the best with the ship- probably Lowen or Gwinna could use the various instruments and readouts to find out more about their attacker’s weaponry or capabilities- but she does know the lore of the deep, and she recognizes the emblem that the pirates are proudly displaying from a hundred stories.

“They won’t talk,” she says. “They don’t care about us, they want the ship. They’ll disable the engines, blast a hole somewhere, let us die in the vacuum, and take it either for scrap or to add to their fleet.”

The third blast punctuates her pronouncement, followed by an ominous distant explosion.

“Engines are disabled,” reports Elliot. Lowen curses.

“What about that special porting thing that your last owner modded?” says Gwinna. “Is that still working?”

“Yes, although with this little time I will have no control over where it takes us.”

“Good enough,” says Dyr. “We’ll deal with wherever it is when we get there. Elliwick, how soon until you make the door?”

There is, horribly, silence.

“Elliwick? Elliwick, can you hear us?” says Dyr, sounding panicked.

“Explosion could have fried the radio,” says Lowen. “Elliot, can you get a read on Elliwick?”

“Elliwick has been disconnected,” says Elliot, just as the ship rocks with another blast. Skjaldi only barely manages to hold herself in the pilot’s chair, and something elsewhere in the ship clatters and crashes to the ground.

“What do you mean, disconnected?” demands Dyr.

“I’ve got a visual,” says Gwinna, and Skjaldi can tell from her voice that it’s going to be bad. “The tether’s completely gone. No sign of her.”

“Okay,” says Dyr. “Okay, I’ve got a suit, I’ll go out. Elliot, do a scan, where is she?”

“Elliwick has been disconnected,” repeats Elliot. There’s a muffled bang over the radio, which Sjkaldi would bet is Dyr thumping the ship wall in frustration.

“She’s not showing up on radar from here,” Skjaldi says, flicking frantically between screens.

“There’s no time,” says Lowen. “Dyr, we’ve got less than a minute until they blow a hole in us.”

“I’ll be quick. Gwinna, get down here, we’ll need to be pulled back into the airlock.”

“On my way,” says Gwinna. Her running footsteps stumble as they take another hit.

“Dyr, we’ve got to go,” says Lowen. “Shields are drawing on life support power.”

“ _Damn it_ ,” says Dyr.

Skjaldi toggles off the shipwide radio. “Elliot, give me the porting controls,” she says, low. They appear on the screen immediately, _take jump?_ flashing just above a lever she’s never used before. She takes a deep breath.

Skjaldi knows a lot of things. She Knows about the universe inexorably darkening around them, though she still isn’t sure why or how that knowledge came to her. She knows stories about it from a myriad of different planets. She knows that there’s next to no chance that Elliwick survived an explosion that destroyed their engines, severed her tether, and catapulted her into space beyond the range of their sensors. She knows Dyr, has known Dyr since they were children together on Stonlum, knows that when it comes down to it Dyr will have to leave Elliwick and escape, knows that it will weigh on her. She knows in her heart that they have a long way to go before this fight is over.

Another explosion rocks the ship. Skjaldi does the only thing she can do; she doesn’t make Dyr give the order. Dyr is a natural leader, but that doesn’t mean they have to let her shoulder every burden alone.

Skjaldi hits the lever, takes the jump, takes the blame.


	3. Two: Lowen

“I still think it’s a trap,” Skjaldi says, clear as anything over the brand new ion radio. Lowen’s been working on it day and night for the last week, ever since they got the mysterious message, and she’s actually quite proud of it. She can hear Dyr’s sigh perfectly even though Lowen’s in the ship and Dyr is pacing on the packed purplish dirt of the planet below, far enough to be nearly indistinguishable if she didn’t have Elliot’s cameras at her disposal.

“It might be, it might not,” says Dyr. “But we’re never going to get any allies if we can’t make at least a little show of good faith.”

“Meeting some mysterious person alone and unarmed is not a little show of good faith, it’s a very large show of yes-please-I-would-like-to-get-kidnapped,” grouses Skjaldi.

“I’m about as armed and surrounded as I can be and still technically fulfill the terms,” Dyr reminds her. “You have half our arsenal with you behind those rocks, Gwinna can get here in five seconds on the skimmer, and Lowen can have the ship down in fifteen.”

“Twelve, actually,” says Lowen. “I’ve been practicing.”

“Twelve,” amends Dyr. “Even if they turn out to be hostile I’m not too worried.”

“I’m more worried about them being punctual than hostile,” says Gwinna, who is definitely getting the worst of the planet’s two suns and none of the breeze where she’s hunkering inside the skimmer. “You’d think someone so interested in a show of good faith would be more on time.”

“Maybe they want us to sweat a little. Literally,” suggests Lowen.

“Says the only one of us who currently has any enviro controls,” Gwinna returns. Anything else Lowen might have said is cut off by the sudden flash of alerts.

“Another ship is approaching,” says Elliot, unprompted. Elliot talks to her a lot more these days. Getting information is nice, but it always makes Lowen feel kind of wretched anyway, a reminder of how different things are now that Elliwick is gone. (They’d gone back afterward, as soon as they could be sure the pirates had left, but every one of them knew it was too late. In the end they’d combed over empty space with every tool at their disposal and hadn’t even found any trace of her body. Lowen still isn’t sure if that’s better or worse.)

“They appear to be well-armed,” says Elliot. Lowen shivers and drags her attention back to the present, where the ship is appearing in visual range. She’d really, really hoped they wouldn’t be armed.

“Here we go,” murmurs Dyr into her radio. Lowen can practically feel all of them tense. This is the dangerous part; precautions or no, if the other ship just opens fire right now there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

“Looks like they’re landing,” she reports. Sure enough, the other ship touches down about a mile off. Some kind of skimmer pod detaches from it and the main ship lifts off again to hover, flashing a quick acknowledging hail to Lowen. She returns it, letting herself relax a little. So far, so good. It seems like these potential allies really do want to talk, whoever they are, and even if it goes badly she has faith in Dyr (and in Gwinna and Skjaldi, if it comes to it) to get out of a negotiation gone sour.

The pod rattles to a stop about twenty feet in front of Dyr and a tall figure steps out, swathed completely in suit.

“O…kay,” says Gwinna. “That’s slightly menacing.”

“Could just be the atmosphere here doesn’t agree with them,” Lowen points out.

“On a planet that they chose as a meeting place?” says Skjaldi skeptically, though in a whisper; her hiding spot isn’t that far off from the meet, and there’s no telling how good this new person’s hearing is. 

“Maybe they chose an atmosphere that would work for us? As...a courtesy?” Gwinna suggests.

“Shhh,” hisses Dyr.

The other person is approaching.

“Thank you for meeting me,” they say, in a deep voice with an accent that Lowen can’t place. They’re obviously speaking loudly to be heard through the suit and across the five or six feet that still separate them from Dyr; it’s coming over Dyr’s radio, but just barely.

“I apologize for this,” they continue, waving a hand at their obscured face. “I would rather speak face to face, but some people react badly when they see me approaching-”

“Wow, that’s ominous,” mutters Gwinna-

“-and so I wanted a chance to speak with you first. Also, I have someone who can vouch for me that I believe you will trust, although I know that isn’t in the terms we agreed to. Would you permit my companion…?” they wave a hand at the pod.

“I thought this was supposed to be one-on-one!” hisses Skjaldi.

“At least they asked, that probably counts as good faith,” says Lowen. “They could have just brought whoever and not asked for permission or given any warning. I say go for it.”

Dyr flicks her microphone pickup, which is probably her way of telling them to shut up without actually sounding like she’s talking to the air.

“Go ahead,” says Dyr, sounding perfectly confident and magnanimous. Lowen wonders how much of it is an act.

Then she abruptly has other things to worry about, because the second person who gets out of the pod is almost comically small next to the suited figure, and Dyr and Skjaldi both gasp-

“I can’t see, what is it?” demands Gwinna-

and Lowen almost breaks the lever off zooming in to confirm that yes, that is definitely Elliwick.

Dyr runs right past the mysterious person to grab her in a hug, apparently either not caring about the potential danger or deciding that Elliwick has it covered.

“Elliwick, oh my god, I can’t believe- oh, god, I’m so sorry,” she’s saying.

“Good to see you too,” says Elliwick. Lowen can hear the grin in her voice, though she can’t actually see it; Dyr’s down on her knees and even so still blocks the camera’s view of Elliwick almost completely.

“What is _going on_?” Gwinna demands.

“Oh, is that Gwinna? Hi Gwinna!” says Elliwick. Some distant part of Lowen makes a mental note that she should adjust the radios to broadcast more quietly, because she never entirely stops thinking about science, even when most of her is busy being in complete shock.

“...hi?” says Gwinna. “Is it really you?”

“Really is,” says Elliwick. “Tsadok here picked me up out of dead space a few weeks ago. Lucky, right? Only I had no idea where you all had gone, so I got him to send a message requesting a rendezvous.”

“You couldn’t have sent something yourself?” asks Dyr. “We thought you were dead!”

“Exactly. I figured that if you got a message signed ‘Elliwick’, you’d probably assume it was a spy with some slightly out of date intel. I wanted to make sure you’d come.”

“I keep saying we need codewords,” mutters Lowen to herself. She makes another note.

“And anyway, I really did want you to meet Tsadok,” continues Elliwick. “I think he’s going to be very useful. He has an _army_ , you’re always saying how an army would be nice, right? Tsadok, you may as well take that off, I promise they’re not going to attack you on sight.”

“I don’t make a habit of attacking anyone on sight, but certainly not the person who saved my friend,” says Dyr, getting to her feet. “Even if we aren’t well-suited as allies, we already owe you a debt.”

“It certainly seems like everything Elliwick told me is true,” says Tsadok, reaching up to remove his helmet. “I think we may be well-suited indeed.”

The first meeting of Dyr and Tsadok will eventually be the stuff of legends, of course, and those few who are lucky enough to witness it will tell the tale over and over. Lowen will perfect her own version in time, but a great deal of it has to be borrowed from Skjaldi, because in truth she isn’t paying very much attention to Dyr and Tsadok at all. Instead she’s watching Elliwick as closely as she can, because Elliwick said she’d been picked up a few weeks ago, but it’s been close to four months since they lost her in the pirate attack. 

 

The thing is, the universe these days is really mostly human. Traces of other ancestry are everywhere, things like Elliwick’s small stature and Skjaldi’s hair and something just sort of _different_ about the bone structure of Gwinna’s face, but the definition of humanity has stretched to include them easily enough. Even the handful of species that have stubbornly retained their own identity, like Tsadok and the army of orcs that he does in fact command, have a fair amount of human in the gene pool.

Lowen is not human at all. Her disguise is well-crafted, but she comes from (in truth, she _ran_ from) a much older race, born on a much older planet. Her people are too smart to become the monsters in Skjaldi’s horror stories; they prefer to control the monsters from the safety of anonymity. They know more about the deep and what lurks in it than anyone in this new human empire. Lowen is young by their standards and wasn’t especially well-liked before she left, and the Genth guard knowledge jealously even among themselves; even so, she knows enough to worry about exactly how Elliwick survived several months of floating in deep space.

Lowen keeps a close eye on her, but mostly Elliwick seems the same. She sweet-talks Elliot and never sits on her chairs properly and convinces Skjaldi to do half her chores as an apology for leaving her behind. She responds to direct inquiries about her adventure by saying things like _hmm, I must have lost track of time_ or _just lucky, I guess_. The others don’t press, and after a while everyone seems to just accept it and move on, trying to adjust their strategy now that they can call on Tsadok and his fleet when they need to. 

Lowen pays attention, though. Lowen watches for anything inexplicable and she notices that sometimes it’s hard to find Elliwick, really inexcusably hard on a ship this small. They go out on a mission that requires suits and when they come back Elliwick’s oxygen hasn’t been depleted at all- though she sees Lowen checking, and the next time they go out she breathes like the rest of them. Once, Lowen catches her talking to...something, something outside the viewport that Lowen would rather not think about at all.

It’s on Elliwick’s pilot shift, so she can’t pull her usual disappearing act without drawing a lot of attention to herself. Lowen plants herself in front of the door just in case.

“Look, I’m not trying to stop you, or tell you that you did anything wrong, or whatever you’re afraid of,” she says. “I know you do what you have to to survive out there. I would have, too. I’m just worried about you, as your friend.”

“I’m fine,” says Elliwick, folding her arms.

“I really hope so,” says Lowen. She wonders if whatever’s outside is listening to them. Well, let it; she’s more of a match for it than it knows.

“I don’t need to know all the details,” she tells Elliwick. “I just want to be prepared if there are any repercussions coming. To be able to keep us all safe. So just answer one question for me honestly and I’ll leave you alone about it, I promise.”

“What’s the question?”

Lowen takes a deep breath, deliberately keeping her eyes on Elliwick and not on the viewport behind her.

“When you were out there,” she says, “did you make a deal?”

Elliwick cocks her head to the side, considering.

“I made a friend,” she says finally.

(This, it should be noted, is not the same thing as saying no.)


	4. Three: Gwinna

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little bit for Ari too. You'll know why. ;D

Gwinna’s the first one back to the outpost where they’ve planned to rendezvous. She secures a room, not as bad as some they’ve stayed in but no more than utilitarian, and goes to the public comsole. Elliwick’s given her a set of codes for the fictitious research ship that Gwinna’s supposedly working on (she still isn’t sure what exactly Elliwick’s family does on that space station, but she’s doubts it’s entirely legal), and when she keys them in there’s a message from her mother waiting to transfer.

It’s strangely long, so she goes back to the room before she reads it, making sure everything is secure and double checking that everyone else is still out of range of the ion radio. All seems quiet. She takes the best bed- there are perks to being the first one back- and opens the message.

_Dearest Gwinna_ , it reads, _I know you’re probably out in deep space and won’t get this for ages, but I was thinking of you today and thought I’d send it anyway. That way you’ll have something to greet you when you dock next!_

_I hope your research is going well, and that you and the rest of the crew haven’t gotten too sick of each other. I know it’s going to be a long-haul journey. Make sure you get some rest, even when things are busy. Have you finished the box of bark chews you brought along? I’m tempted to send you more, but I know a matter transfer at this distance would be a silly expense. That’s what mothers do, though, they worry about their children’s health. Even when their children are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, as I know you are._

_Things are well here. There has been some interesting data coming in from others in our field which I think might be relevant to your endeavors; it seems that more and more interest in the topic is growing among our compatriots. Do you remember my student Devran? She just turned in a rough draft of her thesis, which I have attached here. If you have the time to read it, I think you might be interested both in the research and in seeing how far her scholarship has come!_

_Best of luck with your work. I’m proud of you for committing to it, and I have every confidence that you’ll see it through. Hope to hear from you soon,_

_Your Loving Mother_

 

An unaccustomed wave of homesickness hits Gwinna as she finishes reading. She’s spent most of her life traveling, so the tight quarters and changing landscapes don’t bother her as they do some of the others, but she misses the community of scholars, of people like her, people who’ve known her since she was a baby. She misses her mother’s no-nonsense way of tackling problems. Gwinna does her best to keep the same attitude, but it’s hard to hold onto confidence in the face of everything.

She sighs and turns her attention to the thesis, which is long, dry, and technical- probably by design. It’s not a code, exactly, but the information her mother is sending is certainly well enough disguised within it to deter all but the most determined would-be spy, and even someone with the patience to wade through the entire document would need a background in astronomy or a good research library to have any idea what’s being said. 

She’s been carefully deciphering it for close to an hour when a chime from the radio makes her jump.

“Gwinna? Did you make it back?” It’s Aja, much earlier than expected. Gwinna’s completely failed to accomplish some of the things she really should have gotten done while she had some privacy, but she can’t find it in herself to mind too much. She gives directions to the room and in a few minutes Aja’s at the door, looking tired but unhurt. (When did that become the first thing she checked for in a returning companion?)

“Did you find the person you were looking for?” Gwinna asks. Aja shakes her head.

“They were long gone, by the looks of it. I suppose there wasn’t much chance of finding them after so much time had passed, but I’d hoped. It would be good to build our numbers up.”

Aja doesn’t say much about her past, but Gwinna carefully files away every piece of information, trying to imagine what it would have been like: an entire society built on Knowing, whole planets full of people whose sole purpose and industry was war against the darkness. They’d even had a way to spread the Knowledge to those who lacked it. Aja was one of those born Knowing, which she’d said was not uncommon there, so she wasn’t sure how it had worked, but she’d hoped to find a contact on this outpost who had sourced some of the technology. A place to start, at least. Gwinna wonders if she’d wanted something more personal out of the encounter as well, information or just a moment of contact with someone else who’d known her people and her world before it fell. It seems intrusive to ask.

“Supply run went well enough,” she says instead, gesturing to the packs and crates she’s stacked along the far wall. “There’s food, too, if you want some.”

“Sounds good,” says Aja, offering her a smile, and goes to open the tempbox from the marketplace. The smell that wafts out of it is tempting, even though Gwinna’s already eaten more than her share.

“What is it?” asks Aja.

“I have no idea, but it’s delicious, and it’s not rations.” Between the chance to try dishes from different cultures and the release from the monotony of ship food, eating at ports was one of Gwinna’s favorite treats as a child. She still has a tendency to spend too much money on whatever looks interesting at a marketplace stall. She’ll do it on the go, too, though she knows she’s supposed to run an analyzer over food of foreign origin to make sure it’s actually safe for her system, the way Aja’s doing now. Mostly she just bets on the fact that “mostly human” is the standard clientele at most ports, and that anyone selling food that would poison her would probably go out of business pretty quickly. It’s only caused her problems once or twice.

Aja looks through the rest of the new supplies while she’s waiting for the food to be confirmed safe, and Gwinna goes back to her reading. Having company in the room goes a long way toward easing her sudden bout of loneliness. (Having Aja there in particular always buoys her, these days, lifts her heart and dulls her worry; this is something Gwinna knows and has put aside for the moment.)

“What are you reading?” Aja asks.

“Letter from my mother. I checked in at the comsole.”

“Ah. Sorry, I won’t pry.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Gwinna assures her, suppressing a guilty wince. She has no idea what family structures were in place on Aja’s planet- the little that Aja shares of her background is always of strategic importance, nothing of the day-to-day- but there is almost certainly nothing left of whatever family she once had. Flaunting a letter from her own mother seems insensitive, especially after Aja had spent the day trying to make contact with someone from her past and finding them gone.

“It’s mostly information, actually,” she says. “I asked her to keep an eye out for anyone reporting gravity fluctuations, so she sent me the latest data, though it’s all buried in this fake thesis. I’ve been taking notes as I go. Here, see if you can make anything of this, other than _everything is very bad_.” She passes over her handheld.

“This is a lot,” says Aja, after poring over it for a minute. “Hold on, I need a map.”

They end up with Gwinna reading out data from the thesis and Aja recording it on three separate screens, all of which have been siloed to the point of paranoia. There’s an enormous chart and two maps at different scales, and Aja frowns harder and harder as she goes back and forth between them. Gwinna has to remind her to eat after the analyzer dings its approval.

“We have to go to Ysgard,” Aja says eventually, blinking with the look of someone surfacing through layers of analysis. Gwinna grew up with scientists; she’s accustomed to it.

“What’s in Ysgard?” she asks. It hasn’t been mentioned in the thesis or come up on the maps.

“The next attack, as far as I can tell. Have the others checked in yet? I have to tell Dyr.”

“Not yet,” says Gwinna. “They should be back tomorrow, though, and we can get going as soon as they’re within range of the radios. Or I guess we could leave them a message and just go ourselves, if you think it’s that urgent?”

“No,” says Aja, sighing and sitting back. “It’ll keep for a day, I think.”

Gwinna puts the thesis away and stares at the map screens, blinking ominously from the floor.

“You know, we didn’t actually elect Dyr leader or anything,” she says. “You’re the one who knows the most about this fight, and you can see patterns in this mess of data that I never would have figured out. Maybe you should be in charge.”

Aja laughs and shakes her head. “Being a leader doesn’t have anything to do with knowing the most. Dyr’s in charge because she’s the one who can rally the troops. She inspires people, to believe in her and to believe in the cause. Just having information on its own doesn’t make people follow you.”

“Well, I’d follow you,” says Gwinna, too sincerely. She doesn’t regret it, though, because Aja holds her gaze for a long moment, something in her eyes that makes Gwinna think _maybe now, maybe this is when we finally talk about it_.

Aja looks away first. “I’m tired of leading, anyway,” she says.

“Sorry,” says Gwinna, a little embarrassed. Whoever it was that Aja led and lost, one enamored astronomer probably doesn’t measure up. She gets up and tidies away the tempbox just to have something to do with her hands, trying to ignore the awkward silence.

“This is an amazing amount of information,” Aja says after a moment. “I had no idea your colleagues had access to anything like this. The monitoring network alone must be worth a fortune.”

Gwinna hums noncommittally.

“Do you think we could get our hands on any of it? A loan, or a donation? It sounds like your mother at least is sympathetic to the cause.”

“Probably not, no.”

“What about just getting access to the network they have in place? If we could get this data in real time, rather than waiting until we dock somewhere with a comsole-“

Gwinna shakes her head. “It’s not possible, I’m afraid. We’ll have to settle for transmissions from home.”

“Why?” Aja asks. “Is the monitoring…not entirely legal?”

The thing is, Gwinna could lie. She’s a better liar than people think, which is intentional; she was taught early that the best way to keep someone from guessing your secret is to make them think you couldn’t possible keep one. It would be easy enough to deflect Aja’s questions. She’s tired, though, tired of being alone, tired of fighting a desperate battle against the end of the world and not knowing if she can fully trust any of the people fighting by her side. And she’s tired of wanting Aja and holding back, looking away, always protecting herself.

“It’s legal, technically,” she says, “but we can’t tap into the data feed because there isn’t one. The monitoring isn’t being done by machines. All the astronomers I work with have another sense, just like sight or hearing or Tsadok’s gene-sense, but what they sense is gravity. The data my mother sent is just things people felt and reported.”

She tries to keep her face neutral and her voice level, and isn’t sure if she succeeds. Her heart is pounding.

“I’ve only ever heard of one species that could sense gravity like that,” Aja says slowly, “and they were wiped out a long time ago.” 

Gwinna could still turn back at this point, probably, could make something up about it being more common than people think, could go back to always being careful and safe, careful and safe.

Nothing feels all that safe these days.

She pulls her shirt off and turns around fast, turning her back to Aja before she can lose her nerve. There hasn’t been much time or space for privacy lately; her spines have grown to nearly an inch long since the last time she was able to sneak away without anyone asking why she needed to take a sonic knife into the shower. She’d meant to trim them down tonight before the others returned, but she’d gotten distracted by the letter.

Aja doesn’t say anything. Gwinna looks at her feet and swallows hard.

“You know what they say about humans and breeding with everything,” she offers weakly, to fill the silence. She doesn’t know the name of the other species that is part of her heritage- or at least, not the name they called themselves. All those records had been destroyed in the great purge that killed them. There are names for them in languages throughout the universe, though, names that are synonymous with _monster_ and _demon_ and _horror_ , myths and tales from a myriad of cultures warning of the beings who came from the sky to reign torture and death.

Aja makes a noise behind her that Gwinna can’t interpret.

“Do you know,” Aja says, “I think my ancestors killed your ancestors.”

It could be a threat, but her tone is careful, neutral, and when Gwinna half-turns her expression is the same.

“By all accounts, they were right to do it,” Gwinna offers. It feels like she might choke on the tension in the room.

“And all the astronomers you work with are…”

“We mostly say ‘descendents’, yes. We tend to stick together, try to only make connections within the community. Some people never leave, if they inherited traits that are harder to hide. I’m lucky that I can go out in the universe without too much trouble- all I have is the gravity sense, and, well.” She shrugs, feeling the motion tug at the spines that are caught under the band of her bra. “These.”

“I’ve never seen anything like them,” says Aja, coming to stand behind her. Gwinna is suddenly very aware that she’s standing shirtless in the middle of the room. She swallows hard and keeps her back turned, craning over her shoulder to watch Aja’s face, which looks…something. Focused. Fascinated?

“I keep them trimmed off as much as I can,” Gwinna says. She’s babbling a little, but utterly unable to just stand there and let Aja look at her, even though she’s the one who invited it. “My mother would despair of me for letting it go so long.”

“How long do they grow naturally? If you don’t trim them?”

“I…have no idea,” Gwinna says, realizing its true only as the words come out of her mouth. “I’ve never seen them grown out. My mother used to trim them for me when I was a child, before I could handle the knife. It takes a lot of coordination to cut something on your own spine, you know.” She offers that last as a joke, but it falls flat. Aja frowns.

“I hope you find somewhere safe enough to let them grow, someday,” she says. “You should…it’s not fair, that you don’t get to know your own body.”

“It’s all right,” Gwinna assures her, taken aback. She didn’t really think Aja would outright attack her or try to throw her off the ship or anything- she wouldn’t have broken all the rules to do this if she had- but she certainly hadn’t expected this reaction either.

“It’s not like I’ve ever grown my hair out to see how long it would go, either,” she points out.

“You could if you wanted to, though, without worrying about getting attacked in the street.”

“I…suppose,” says Gwinna.

Aja shakes her head, dismissing that line of thought. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s none of my business.” 

“I did strip and turn my back on you,” Gwinna says with half a smile.

“Thank you for that.”

“For the stripping?” That’s too far, maybe, but Gwinna’s awash in so much adrenaline that she can’t even tell how much of it is about the confession and how much is about the nakedness anymore.

“For trusting me,” Aja says, but she smiles back, and there’s something in her eyes that makes Gwinna keep wanting to push boundaries (something about Aja _always_ makes her want to push, even with her mother’s voice in the back of her head warning her that outsiders aren’t safe.)

“May I?” asks Aja. She’s reaching one hand out tentatively, and Gwinna’s still too caught up in how Aja thinks it’s unfair that she has to hide, ancestral feud or no, to really process what she’s doing when she nods yes, of course yes.

Aja runs a hand lightly down the quills along her spine, from just between her shoulderblades to the small of her back, and it’s not like she didn’t know- as a teenager she would “forget” to trim sometimes so she could feel the tug of the half-grown spines, writhing on her back in bed with a hand between her legs- but oh, oh, it’s a thousand times better when it’s someone else touching them. She manages to swallow down what would have been an extremely telling noise, but she can’t quite stop the full-body shudder that quakes through her.

Aja stops short.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Fine,” says Gwinna. It comes out a little choked. Aja’s hand is frozen just above her waistband, only barely touching her, and Gwinna is absolutely not going to arch into the warmth of her palm the way she wants to.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No, no. I’m fine. Sorry.” She is definitely, definitely blushing. Even facing away isn’t going to hide it, not when Aja’s standing so close and Gwinna is, yes, still half-naked.

“You’re sure?” says Aja, somehow still sounding worried.

“I promise you didn’t hurt me,” Gwinna says. She stares at the ground and wills herself to sound nonchalant. “I’m just, ah. Not used to it. What with the constant hiding and everything, I…don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”

“…oh,” says Aja, with what is probably dawning realization. Gwinna isn’t entirely sure if she hopes it is or hopes it isn’t. She feels frozen in place, face burning, like maybe if she turns around it will break some kind of spell and Aja will stop touching her. She would do a lot if it meant Aja didn’t stop touching her.

“So,” says Aja. There’s a smile in her voice now. “Shall I…keep going?”

“Um. Yes?” says Gwinna, which isn’t incredibly articulate, but at least it isn’t _please_.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Aja, I am so sure-“ she cuts herself off with a gasp, because Aja didn’t repeat the same stroke; this time she went up, and if her hand smoothing down Gwinna’s spines made her want to arch and purr like a cat, rubbing them the wrong way sends a sudden, desperate jolt of electricity all the way through her. 

“Still okay?” says Aja, low.

“Yes.”

She expects the first motion again but instead Aja combs through the quills at the very top of her spine, searching out the gaps between them and running light fingers down the length of each one individually. It sets Gwinna shivering uncontrollably, nearly panting in the quiet room.

“Gwinna,” says Aja, and it’s the note of wonder in her voice that makes Gwinna finally turn to face her. The motion puts her close, too close, but she doesn’t back away, and neither does Aja. Her eyes are hot and intent. Her hand is still on Gwinna’s back, though for the moment it’s still enough that she can breathe.

“My people wouldn’t have approved of Dyr and Tsadok,” Aja says, which is…not at all what she expected, but she can go with it. There’s definitely some kind of relevant conclusion coming here, and also Aja hasn’t let her go or looked away.

“They wouldn’t?” prompts Gwinna, when nothing else seems forthcoming.

Aja shakes her head minutely, not enough to actually break eye contact. “They didn’t believe in relationships like that. Some relationships, yes: comrades in arms, mentors to pass knowledge down to their students. But they thought that romance would be too much of a distraction. Being so tied to one person, you might make decisions that were good for them instead of good for the war.”

“And what do you think?” Gwinna asks.

“I think they’re all dead,” says Aja, with a bitterness that Gwinna has never heard from her before. “I think they’re all dead, so whatever advantage they thought they gained by not letting themselves be happy, it clearly wasn’t worth very much.”

Gwinna can’t begin to find the right words for that, so she just opens her arms and pulls Aja into a hug, holding on while Aja buries her face in Gwinna’s shoulder and takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then another. It’s the least composed that Gwinna’s ever seen her. She feels oddly honored, proud to be trusted with it, and also like she really wants to somehow resurrect Aja’s whole society, give them a rough shake, and hand them all back to Aja feeling a little ashamed of themselves.

She settles for stroking Aja’s hair.

After a long moment Aja seems to gather herself, pulling away into something like her normal composure, if her normal composure involved looking at Gwinna with something amazed and a little nervous in her eyes. She cups Gwinna’s face and runs a thumb over her cheek. (It feels nothing like Aja’s hand smoothing down her spines, but her eyes want to flutter shut anyway. She doesn’t let them.)

“Okay,” says Aja.

“Okay?” Gwinna echoes.

“Okay. Just.” Aja pauses, swallows. “Don’t go.”

“I won’t,” Gwinna promises, meaning it with all her heart, and kisses her.

 

  
(Later, tucked warm and shiveringly casually into the same bed, Gwinna watches the dull ceiling of the rented room and thinks that Aja’s people were wrong. She doesn’t feel any less inclined to keep fighting than before. The cause doesn’t seem any less important; the Knowing still eats at her just as much. The only thing that’s changed is that, somehow, the dark closing in all around them seems a little more bearable than it did this morning. Somehow, she has a little more hope.)


	5. Four: Asmun

It’s not terribly comfortable, wedged into an access panel behind some kind of heavily-bolted storage cabinet, but Asmun’s hidden is worse places for worse reasons. And for longer times, apparently- she’s barely been in there for twenty minutes when Elliot gives her the requested warning and lowers the ramp for the returning crew.

They seem to be in high spirits, from what she can hear. It’s possible that she gets a little teary at the sound of Dyr’s voice, but the whole point is that no one can see her, so whatever. She’s just started trying to match the voices with what galaxy rumor has told her about the people on Dyr’s crew when-

“There’s someone on the ship,” says one of them, low and commanding. There’s a sudden tense silence, except for what she suspects is the scrape of weaponry. 

Asmun swears internally, a litany that her sister would definitely not be proud of her knowing. What a stupid mistake. She knew that Dyr was keeping company with an orc at least some of the time, and she’s heard that they can sense people’s DNA, but like an idiot she just assumed that if she was hidden she’d be safe. Despite the crew she’s been running with while she tried to catch up with Dyr, she still isn’t used to accounting for different types of senses. It makes her feel provincial and naive, like every planetside stereotype she hates.

“Wait,” says the orc- presumably Tsadok, unless Dyr has multiple members of the army with her. “It’s someone related to you, Dyr. Have you heard anything from your family?”

“No,” says Dyr, sounding baffled. “I guess it’s possible I could have some kind of distant relative out here-”

“Not distant,” says Tsadok, and okay, the gene sensing thing is pretty cool, even if it is completely screwing up her plan. “Close. Very close. You mentioned you had a brother?”

This is so not how she wanted to do this. Oh, well. You have to work with what you get.

“Sister, actually,” says Asmun loudly, and wriggles her way out from behind the access panel, trying to keep her hands visible in case there’s still weaponry in play. She ducks around the cabinet and there’s Dyr, looking almost exactly the same even though she’s apparently leading the fight to save the galaxy now. There are five or six other people around too, and some of them do in fact have guns, but Asmun can’t really be bothered to care because she definitely has to hug her sister right now.

“God, it’s good to see you,” says Dyr, and, “you grew again,” and, “sister?”

“I would’ve told you if you’d left us, oh, literally any possible way to get in contact with you,” Asmun says. Dyr at least has the grace to look a little ashamed.

“It was for your own safety,” she says. “I knew I was going to make enemies out here. I didn’t want any of that getting back to Stonlum.”

“Yeah, I definitely feel safer knowing that your enemies might be coming for me and having no way to get a message to you about it. Doesn’t sound like particularly good strategy to me, Miss I Apparently Lead An Army Now And Should Know How To Think These Things Through.”

“I don’t know why I missed you,” Dyr says, rolling her eyes, though there’s nothing but fondness in her tone. “Why are you here, anyway? Nothing’s wrong at home, is it?”

“No, no, everything’s fine. I came to join up.”

Dyr’s gaze goes sharp. “You Know?” she says. 

Asmun really hates that audible capital. She’s always hated it, ever the council meeting where Dyr had presented her case and then walked out alone and never come back. Asmun would’ve gone with her then, but she wasn’t exactly an official member of the council, and she had to wait for the entire meeting hall to empty out before she could safely leave the hiding place where she’d been eavesdropping. She’d made it just in time to see the ship disappear into the glare of the sun.

“No, but so what?” she says. “I believe you. You must have some allies who didn’t have a prophetic dream or whatever. I can help.”

“Absolutely not,” says Dyr.

“Why not?”

“You’re sixteen!”

“And what, because I’m sixteen I should just sit tight and wait to get swallowed by creepy universe-eating darkness? I heard everything you said to the council. I don’t want to sit on Stonlum until I die, Dyr, I want to fight.”

“You don’t know what it’s like out here.”

“Neither did you before you left, you didn’t let it stop you.”

Dyr sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “Do you want to have this conversation somewhere more private, maybe?” she says.

“Nope,” says Asmun. “Come on, you haven’t even introduced me to your friends yet. Hey, guys. Hey, Skjaldi.”

“Hi, Asmun,” says Skjaldi, with the same tone of tolerant amusement that used to greet every new toy Asmun insisted on showing her. Good to know some things haven’t changed.

“Okay,” says Dyr. “Asmun, this is Tsadok, Lowen, Elliwick, Gwinna, and Aja. Everyone, this is Asmun, who will definitely only be staying with us for a very short time before she goes home. With a way to get in contact with us, if need be,” she adds, raising her eyebrows at Asmun as if to say _look, I can be reasonable._ “Any questions?”

“Do you have any embarrassing videos of baby Dyr? Skjaldi didn’t bring any, for some reason,” says one of them (Asmun thinks it’s Lowen, but the introductions went by pretty fast). There are various noises of agreement; on the whole, Dyr’s crew seems mostly entertained by the whole scene, which is at least better than hostile.

“I do have a question, actually,” says the short one who Asmun is fairly sure is Elliwick. “How did you get in here?”

Asmun grins. “That is an excellent question, and probably one you all should have asked earlier. It turns out that your exciting adventures have been causing quite the stir around the universe, did you know? It’s actually possible to track the rumors well enough to figure out where you’re headed, and it’s _very_ possible to beat you there and then break into your ship once you leave it. If you really do have enemies who are after you, you’ve got to either shut down some of that intel or seriously beef up your security. Or both, preferably.” 

She takes a seat on a nearby crate and spreads her hands, deliberately appealing to the rest of the crew. “See? I told you I could be helpful. I know enough to help with the security stuff, and I have some good connections for the other.”

“You have good connections?” echoes Skjaldi. “How long have you even been off planet?”

“A while,” says Asmun, shrugging. “I hitched a ride with a merchant-” well, technically she’d stowed away, but Alex had been nice about it and let her work off the debt- “and ended up with some bounty hunters. It’s a long story. But I’m telling the truth when I say I can do something about the information leaking.”

“She kind of has a point,” says either Aja or Gwinna. “If a planetside teenager can track us down- no offence, Asmun-”

“None taken.”

“- then it’s probably sheer luck that no one else has.”

“Just because she pointed out a valid problem doesn’t mean she has to be the one to fix it. We could hire someone with some more actual experience” says Dyr, arms folded. Asmun’s kind of missed arguing with her, actually. 

“You could hire someone,” she allows. “But I hear that what you’re up to might be kind of sensitive. Are you sure there’s someone out there you’d trust with all of your security? More than you’d trust your own sister?”

“You did just break into my ship,” Dyr reminds her.

“Yes, but only to help you!”

“This is amazing,” says probably-Elliwick in a stage whisper. “Are they always like this?”

“This is nothing,” Skjaldi mutters back. “Remind me to tell you about the year Dyr discovered hunger strikes sometime.”

“I was nine,” protests Dyr, though Asmun can tell she’s fighting a smile. “And thanks for all of your support, everybody. Asmun, we are going to talk about this further, but you may as well come with us to our next stop. It’ll be easier to get back to Stonlum from there anyway, and I’m definitely not going to leave you stranded here.”

“Sounds great,” says Asmun, bouncing to her feet. “Elliot, where’s the next planned destination?”

“The next destination is Varhuld.”

“Awesome. Let’s go.”

“Initiating flight protocols now. Please strap in or hold on as appropriate.”

Asmun grabs a handhold and grins around at everyone’s flabbergasted faces.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” she says. “I also took control of your ship.”

 

So, yeah. Asmun gets to stay.


	6. Five: Gwinna

They find Zeth on a planet that’s mostly ocean.

It’s of no particular importance, no life there, native or otherwise. It has a designation but no name in any language that they know of; someone counted it once, but no one’s ever particularly cared. They should be flying straight past it.

Instead, Gwinna wakes abruptly in the middle of the ship’s night, nauseous with an impossible dragging pull and mysteriously alone. She stumbles to the helm. It’s Asmun’s pilot shift but Aja’s there too, staring intently at the little blue planet on the viewscreen.

“Gwinna? Woah, you look awful,” says Asmun. Aja holds out a hand to her and she takes it gladly.

“What’s going on?” asks Gwinna.

“There’s something down there,” Aja says. Her voice is perfectly even, because it’s Aja, but to Gwinna’s eye she looks rattled. “Something that…shouldn’t be. Something from my planet.”

“How do you know?”

“I can’t really explain it. I never asked about how anything worked, I just…did what I was supposed to. Tuning, it’s some kind of brain surgery, part of everyone’s basic training. Lets you sense when allies and important tech are nearby, like…tapping into a network, kind of?” She shakes her head. “I haven’t heard anything through it in years.”

“What’s down there?”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t work like that.”

“But you think it’s important enough that we should go down?”

“Anything big enough for me to sense is probably worth it. Asmun says there are one or two landmasses big enough for us to set down, and then we can take the skimmer if we’re careful.”

“Yeah, you do _not_ want to touch the water down there,” says Asmun, who’s singlehandedly discovered about twenty-five new useful data collection systems on the ship since she arrived. Their scanning capabilities are far better now. “Or, I guess it’s not actually water, obviously. Sorry. The not-water. The liquid. Whatever, it’s bad.”

“What if the thing’s under the not-water?” says Gwinna, which is not the best sentence she’s ever strung together, but it feels a little like the whole ship is tilting under her feet so it’ll have to do.

“I’m working on that,” says Asmun.

“Why don’t you wake the others?” Gwinna suggests. “They’ll want to know if we’re going down, and maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

“…Sure,” says Asmun. Gwinna tries very hard to convey _I want a private moment to comfort my girlfriend who just found a relic from her dead people_ with her eyebrows. It may or may not succeed, but at least Asmun gets up and heads down the hall. If she’s suspicious about Gwinna’s real motivation, well, she’ll have to deal with that later.

In an ideal world she actually would be comforting her girlfriend, but Aja’s just about the steadiest person she knows, and there are more urgent things to deal with right now.

“Aja,” she says, “that planet’s turning into a black hole.”

“It’s _what_?” Aja turns to stare at her. “That-“

“-Makes no sense, I know. I can’t explain it, I can only tell you what I can feel. Something’s wrong with it, it’s just…sucking in everything around it, and it’s getting worse. Could it be your object doing it?”

“No,” says Aja. “No, that’s nothing of ours. That’s a move by the other side. If we go down there, will we make it out?”

“If it keeps up at this rate? Only if we’re very, very fast.”

 

They go anyway, of course. It ends up being Gwinna, Aja, Lowen, and Dyr in the skimmer. Gwinna looks over the others who are staying and decides that Elliwick is probably the least likely to ask questions; she grabs her aside and whispers, “Listen, if I say go, you guys get back into open space immediately, okay? Don’t wait for us. If things go badly, you might only have seconds to get off this planet.”

“Or what?” says Elliwick, blinking at her.

“Or we all go squish. If it’s a choice between some of us getting out and none of us getting out, you guys go, okay?”

“All right,” says Elliwick. She squints suspiciously but doesn’t ask any more questions, which is about as much as Gwinna could hope for. She follows the others to the skimmer, gratefully catching Aja’s hand when she stumbles a little.

“I’m fine,” she murmurs. And she is, mostly. It’s just that balancing in the middle of this is a bit like trying to hear a quiet conversation while the entire planet is screaming.

 

Strangely, the yawning pull of impossible gravity seems to lessen the closer they get to the mysterious object. By the time Aja sets the skimmer down about half an hour later, the planet is behaving almost as Gwinna would expect it to.

“You know, I’m feeling much better,” she says as they all clamber out, catching Aja’s eye. Hopefully that will get her point across.

The little island they’re on is barely more than a scrap of rock, covered almost entirely in a dense, scratchy foliage. Aja’s landed the skimmer near the highest point, on the only part of it flat enough to actually serve. She nods at Gwinna and starts to lead them down, picking a winding path around loose stones and impassible thickets. After a few minutes of careful scrambling they edge around a tumble of boulders and find themselves looking at a small hollow where the plant life has been trampled flat. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of it, eyes closed and palms flat to the ground, is….Aja.

Well. It looks like Aja, if Aja had gone to every possible length to not look like herself. It’s unmistakably her face, but half her hair is shaved and the other half is dyed a shining metallic copper color. She’s wearing a loose, thin dress utterly unlike Aja’s usual practical uniform, and tattoos cover almost every inch of her visible skin.

The Aja standing next to Gwinna stops in her tracks, all the color draining from her face.

“If you just wait another two minutes, this planet will be stabilized. Then you can go ahead and kill me or whatever, but trust me, you really want this gravity well taken care of first,” says the other Aja.

“We’re definitely not going to kill you,” says Gwinna’s Aja. Her counterpart’s eyes fly open. The two of them stare at each other for a long, long moment.

“Well,” says Other Aja eventually. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“How did you survive?” asks Aja. Her voice shakes.

Other Aja shrugs. “I ran. How did _you_ survive?”

“I stayed.”

“And how did that work out for you?”

“I’m sure you know what happened,” says Aja.

“Hard to avoid hearing that kind of news, yeah,” says Other Aja. “Everyone dies, end of the world, all that. Still, you seem to have landed on your feet. Got a whole new squad now, I see.”

“Gwinna, Dyr, Lowen,” Aja says, gesturing without even glancing in their direction. “The others are back with the ship.”

It makes Gwinna feel a little better, actually. Even though Aja looks more distressed than she ever could have imagined, she clearly trusts this person- whoever they are- with all of their identities and positions. That must be a good sign.

“It’s nice to meet you, um. Aja?” she ventures.

“Oh,” says the actual Aja. “I’m sorry. Um, what-“

“Which one am I, is that what you meant to ask?” says Other Aja, with a bitter smile.

“No,” says Aja. “I know who you are. I was going to ask what name you’re using these days. I didn’t think it would still be-“

“I’ve been calling myself Zeth.”

Gwinna has no idea what this means, but it obviously has some significance to Aja, who flinches. Zeth looks vindictively pleased. Gwinna has an overwhelming urge to go support Aja in some way, put an arm around her waist or take her hand, but it somehow feels almost physically impossible to insert herself into whatever’s going on here. The two of them haven’t looked away from each other once.

“I’m sorry,” she says, trying to keep her voice level and pleasant, “but who are you? What is actually going on here?”

Zeth turns to her for the first time. She’s smirking, which is incredibly unnerving; it’s Aja’s face, unmistakably, but where Aja’s expression is usually serene, Zeth seems to show every emotion, twisting every quirk of her eyebrows and millimeter of her smile to suit her purposes. Or maybe Gwinna’s being too harsh and Zeth isn’t doing it voluntarily at all. She feels off balance, utterly lost in trying to assign meaning to anything in this encounter.

“Oh, Aja didn’t tell you?” Zeth says, overly sweet. “Back when the war was starting to go poorly, they decided that the best strategy to strengthen the ranks was to take their favorite soldier and make a bunch of clones of her.”

“ _I didn’t know_ ,” says Aja.

“You didn’t ask,” snaps Zeth. The two of them are back to staring at each other like no one else exists.

“It’s okay, I wouldn’t expect you to.” Zeth adds. “Good soldiers don’t ask, right? That’s the whole point.”

Aja ignores that. “Did any of the rest survive?” she asks instead. Zeth shakes her head minutely. Aja swallows, looking stricken.

There’s a long silence. Gwinna doesn’t dare interrupt this one.

“Well,” says Zeth eventually. “That’s the gravity well taken care of, at least.” She shifts, unfolding her legs and rolling her shoulders, looking down at the ground.

“How?” asks Aja.

“You don’t think I ran on a whim, do you?” says Zeth. “I packed, obviously.” She appears to lift something off the ground and toss it to Aja, who appears to catch it- except Gwinna can’t see any sign of an actual object. She darts a glance at the others. Dyr’s looking as bewildered as she is, but Lowen is frowning and squinting at Aja’s hands.

Aja’s also staring down at whatever it is that she’s apparently holding. “I don’t understand,” she says. “What are you doing here, with this?”

“Fixing a gravity well,” says Zeth, in a tone that clearly conveys _I just told you that_.

“But why?” says Aja. “This planet can’t matter to you, it’s not even properly habitable, and it’s not near anything. How did you even get here?”

“Cryo pod,” says Zeth.

“So wait, correct me if I’m wrong,” says Aja, beginning to smile. “You ran from the war, but ever since you’ve been sailing blindly through open space in an unprotected cryo pod, somehow finding planets that are in danger and singlehandedly saving them.”

Zeth wraps her arms around her knees, looking uncomfortable.

“Guess the programming worked better than they thought,” she says.

“I don’t think that’s it,” says Aja.

“What would you know about it?”

Aja shrugs, letting that go. She seems to have gained the high ground in the exchange, and Gwinna suspects that both of them know it.

“Unprotected cryo’s got to be the worst possible way to travel,” she says. “Do you want a lift off this planet?”

 

Having Zeth on board is incredibly strange. When Aja isn’t there she’s perfectly pleasant with the rest of them, even friendly. She lets Lowen take a look at the mysterious invisible object, though she makes it clear that she’ll be taking it with her when she goes, and she and Elliwick have some kind of ongoing card game that’s utterly obscure from the outside. She and Aja seem to be avoiding much direct interaction, but whatever they’re doing is the opposite of ignoring each other; even when they’re across the room talking to different people they seem to be mostly focused on each other, and Gwinna catches each of them staring after the other with something that she can’t quite put a name to. Hunger, maybe. Desperation.

They meet up with Tsadok a few weeks into Zeth’s stay, and there’s a not-technically-a-meeting with the whole crew where he and Dyr get into an argument over whether to conscript her. Dyr believes that they should be preserving everyone’s free will for as long as they can; Tsadok argues that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and that if Zeth can help them win the war then they owe it to the universe to keep her there.

Aja stands up from her chair in the middle of the discussion, eyes hard.

“If you try to make her fight, I’m walking off this ship,” she says. “And frankly, I doubt you have the means to make either of us do anything against our will.”

 

Gwinna finds her later, sitting on her bunk and staring sightlessly into space.

“Are you all right?” she asks, and then winces. It seems like the wrong question. Aja hasn’t been all right in a long, long time. Zeth isn’t even the cause of it, just a constant reminder.

“Is there anything I can do?” she amends. Aja doesn’t say anything, but she shifts over to make room, so Gwinna comes to sit beside her. After a moment Aja leans carefully against her shoulder.

“I think I might need some time,” she says. “I’m not sure of anything right now.”

“Okay,” says Gwinna. She swallows hard. “Just. Don’t go.”

It feels selfish, like too much to ask, but she asks it anyway. Aja squeezes her hand.

“I promise,” she says.

They sit quietly like that for a long time.

 

Zeth asks to be dropped off at the next port. Gwinna means to stay out of the way to let her and Aja say whatever kind of goodbye they can manage; she has no idea whether it will be heartfelt or cruel or maybe both, but she suspects that they won’t want an audience. To her surprise, though, Zeth stops by her room before she leaves.

“I know you have ways to get in contact with us,” Gwinna tells her. “I hope we see you again sometime, whether you decide to help out or if you just want the company.”

Surprise is clear as anything on Zeth’s face. Gwinna’s almost used to it now, the constant elasticity of her expressions.

“Huh,” says Zeth. She doesn’t seem to doubt that Gwinna’s in earnest, but she does seem perplexed by it. “I would’ve thought you’d be glad to see the back of me. Get Aja all to yourself again, you know.”

Gwinna hadn’t actually been sure whether Zeth knew about her relationship with Aja. They’ve certainly never discussed it.

“I don’t need to be everything to Aja,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “If you do, that’ll be a problem. But otherwise, I know she’d be glad to see you again.”

Zeth watches her for a minute, narrow-eyed. Gwinna lets her.

“Well,” Zeth says finally. “Keep her safe.”

And then she’s gone.


	7. Six: Dyr

“Don’t look,” says Tsadok, and Dyr shakes herself and closes her eyes and turns away, again. They’re sitting with their backs to it- at least she thinks they are- at least, they planned to- but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. It draws her eyes. It feels like it’s drawing her mind, too.

“If I gave you my breather-“ he starts.

“Don’t,” she says sharply. “I don’t want any extra minutes if I have to spend them sitting next to your corpse.”

(It’s not the first time they’ve had this fight, or one like it.)

“All right,” says Tsadok. An empty victory; he wouldn’t give in so easily if he thought there was any hope of rescue.

“How much air do you have?” she asks him.

“Twenty-three minutes.”

Dyr has twenty-six, with the flow turned down to the absolute minimum required to keep her conscious. She turns it up a hair, so they match. The extra oxygen doesn’t seem to make a difference- her head is still swimming, dizzy and nauseous and hot- but maybe that’s from getting too close to it, and not from oxygen deprivation at all.

She’s wearing a full protective suit, since they hadn’t know what danger she might be facing- not that it’s doing her any good. Tsadok’s only added a breather to his regular clothes, and their atmospheric tolerances are basically the same. (He withstands some radiation better than she does, but that’s not going to matter in twenty three minutes). She takes her helmet off, slow, mindful of exerting herself, of every breath. Next the fasteners at her neck, arms, waist, pulling the thin material away from her and letting it fall to the ground.

The air of the planet is somehow clammy and hot all at once, dragging sticky over her exposed skin. Or maybe that’s just what she thinks. By now, she’s used to the way her mind reaches for inappropriate metaphors, substitutes the wrong experiential vocabulary in a scramble to make sense of new planets, foreign sensations. Maybe it only feels humid because on Stonlum drawing a breath with low oxygen content meant water in the air. Probably whatever she’s inhaling and exhaling so uselessly now is something different altogether.

She takes Tsadok’s hand in hers. The motion is strangely easy; for some reason it feels like there’s more energy in her metal arm than in the rest of her body put together, although every other piece of machinery she has is faltering if it hasn’t already failed. This seems like an important realization, but she loses track of it because Tsadok isn’t responding to her. She just barely stops herself from following his gaze.

“Don’t look,” she tells him, and squeezes his fingers in hers hard enough to hurt. He flinches, shudders, turns back to her.

(She’d thought it was behind them. Maybe it’s moving, overtaking. Maybe they’re already within it, swallowed without a trace left for anyone who might come looking.)

“Do you think the others will come after me?” she asks. Tsadok holds her gaze for a long moment before answering.

“Yes,” he says. Not the answer she’d like, but the truth, which is what she expects of him. He’s no more likely to lie to spare her feelings than she is to want them spared.

“They’re smart,” Tsadok adds. “When you don’t return they’ll know that there could be danger, or something unexpected. They’ll be prepared.”

If only there was some way to tell them to just leave her, leave this whole place far behind, but Lowen’s ion radio had been the first thing to die. The others might even be out looking for her already; she has no grasp at all of how much time has passed. She hopes with all her heart that Tsadok’s right and they’re being smart about it. She can imagine them arguing, trying to formulate a plan. The cooler heads might well prevail- there’s Aja, with her years of experience, Elliwick who probably already has three contingency plans, Skjaldi, who hasn’t compromised rationality for emotion in a long time. She hopes they’ll be enough to stop the ones who might run into danger with strategies only half-formed; Gwinna, Lowen, and oh god, Asmun. Oh, Asmun.

“Dyr?” She’s squeezing his fingers again. She loosens her grip, takes a ragged breath, forgets to keep it shallow. Think of anything else, anything.

“What about the fleet?” she makes herself ask. “Will they come after you?”

Tsadok shakes his head.

“They don’t even know where I am. Well, Lyon might, but he won’t follow once I’m gone. I left orders for them, it’ll be all right. They’re to follow your command in my absence, and if both of us are gone they’ll find Aja.”

Aja will hate that, Dyr thinks, but it’s a good plan. She has a tactical mind like Tsadok’s, will know what can and cannot be done with an only somewhat-human armada, and they’ll respect her history enough to listen to her. She’ll get on well with Jeris and Emron, Tsadok’s lieutenants.

Lyon could be a bit of a wildcard. He’s always unnerved her slightly, maybe because he’s the only person she’s met so far who doesn’t have at least a little bit of human ancestry (Dyr is wrong about this, as it happens, but Lyon goes to fewer pains to conceal himself than Lowen does). He has orcish blood, like Tsadok, but she doesn’t know what species gave him his odd, elongated features, his predator’s eyes and unnervingly liquid way of moving. Dyr tries extra hard to like him out of the suspicion that her unease is based in her own xenophobia, but he’s never been inclined to reciprocate he effort, as far as she can tell. She wouldn’t begin to guess what he might do in any given situation, but if Tsadok says Lyon will mind his orders and not come after them, she’ll have to believe that.

Something occurs to her then, a thought she would have had a long time ago, if she wasn’t too ill and disoriented to hold onto anything (wait- there was something else, something important, that she’d thought of and lost- wasn’t there?), if the sight of Tsadok’s familiar silhouette approaching hadn’t been so welcome and so heartbreaking at the same time.

“Hold on,” she says. “How did you find me? Everything I had that could transmit a location failed way back, and you didn’t even know we’d be here anyway. Did the others call you when I didn’t come back?” How long had she been here? Could it have been days? Weeks? No, that didn’t make sense, her air couldn’t have lasted that long.

“They didn’t call me,” Tsadok says.

“Then how?”

“Well.” He pauses for such a long time that she’s sure his attention’s been caught again (what will happen if they both look at it at the same time?), but he’s just staring down at their joined hands, frowning in thought.

“There’s no word for it,” he says eventually. “I’m not sure anyone’s tried to explain this in human language before.” He says something in Orcish and she winces, shakes her head. She’s been trying to learn a little but it’s slow going and doesn’t come easily. She doesn’t even recognize any of the word-components in what he’s said, except maybe…

“Feet?” she hazards. He tilts his head.

“I suppose a literal translation might be something like ‘footpath’, actually, but that really doesn’t explain it at all.”

“So what is it?”

“You know about gene-sensing?” She nods. “It’s part of that, in a way. At least, the same organ is involved- it’s been studied extensively despite being mostly the stuff of poetry, and even so we don’t completely understand the biology of it.”

“Tsadok.” Is he prevaricating on purpose, or is he just finding it as hard to follow a linear train of thought as she is? “How did you find me?”

“Oh,” he says. “Yes. I always know where you are.”

She stares at him. He offers her half a smile.

“It happens to some of us, if there’s a particular person who’s…important. I can’t help but know where you are. Not what’s around you, but how far away you are and in what direction- the way I sensed Asmun on your ship, except I could only have found her within a range of, oh, maybe thirty feet. With you, the distance is no matter. I always know.”

“Oh,” she manages, entirely inadequately. That does explain a number of things, now that she thinks about it.

“And I feel what you feel, a little,” he adds. “That’s how I knew that you were in trouble. I should have told you about it sooner.”

“Yes,” she says, but there’s no room in her heart to be angry with him, no _time_ to be angry with him. She lifts their joined hands and presses them against her chest, closing her suddenly stinging eyes.

“Thank you,” she says. “For coming after me.”

“Always,” he says, with the same conviction he’s had from the start, as if always wasn’t- she checks- only four minutes more.

Four? That can’t possibly be right. Her breather is failing at last, maybe, or else time itself is failing, being twisted and absorbed by it just like everything else.

Tsadok follows her gaze to the timer, and she can see the same realization in his face, the creeping panic. They’ve been together in situations where death seemed certain before, but never where he had to just sit and let it come. His grip on her hand would be crushingly painful if he wasn’t holding the metal one.

She runs her other hand over his hair, tugs at the nape of his neck so he tilts his forehead against hers.

“I’m sorry. I know you wanted a warrior’s death,” she says.

“And I’ll have one,” he says. “I can think of nothing more honorable than fighting _that_ to the last.” He tips his head, but keeps his eyes locked on hers, with what looks like extraordinary effort. Good. She won’t let it take their last moments away from them.

“You wanted to be with your family,” he says.

“I am,” she tells him fiercely, and it’s true, but oh, what she wouldn’t give to feel the warmth of Pelea one more time, to see her sister. What she wouldn’t give to have the life she’d dared to imagine with Tsadok. It’s almost beyond understanding that they don’t have any more time.

“Dyr,” he says, strained, and abruptly she realizes that if he feels some of what she feels, it must be pulling at him even harder than it is at her- and she can feel it scrabbling ever closer at the edges of her mind.

“Don’t look,” she tells him. “Close your eyes. I’ve got you.” And she holds him to her and keeps her gaze determinedly on the sand, waiting for every shallow breath to be the last of the oxygen she has, and that’s why she’s the one who seems the small, familiar boots step up to them and stop.

She looks up.

It’s Elliwick, the small oxygen tank on her back already flashing an amber warning light. A second, full-sized tank is slipping from her precarious grip as she stares past them at the roil of color that stretches from horizon to horizon, a dizzying, mesmerizing wall with no visible start or end. It doesn’t fit properly into the way your mind can comprehend space, and it swallows your consciousness into its sickening, churning depths as easily and uncaringly as it swallows planets. Even looking determinedly away from it, Dyr can feel it grating away at her sanity.

“Elliwick!” she shouts, with as much air and energy as she has to spare, but it has no effect. The spare oxygen tank thunks to the ground unheeded. Tsadok jerks away from her and to his feet in one impossibly fast movement, standing in front of Elliwick and covering her entire face with one palm.

“Listen to me,” he says, quick and low and utterly serious. “You have to get your mind out of it, or all three of us are going to die here. Don’t think about it, don’t look at it, just focus on us as hard as you can. With me?”

He shakes her, roughly. Elliwick nods, and when he releases her she keeps her gaze trained carefully down.

“Good,” says Tsadok, and Dyr comes closer so the three of them are a tight circle around the dropped oxygen tank, huddling close and keeping everything else at bay. Her mind is whirring, panicked into action. There’s only one oxygen tank, because Eilliwick didn’t know Tsadok was here.

“How’d you get here?” Tsadok asks, sharp. He’s thinking strategically too.

“Skimmer,” says Elliwick. “It gave out a while back, though. Too far. How much oxygen have the two of you got left?”

“Minutes. If that,” says Dyr.

“Elliwick,” says Tsadok, and the two of them exchange a long look rather than any more words, as if Dyr doesn’t know what he’s conveying: _save her, leave me_.

She’s wondered before if Elliwick’s loyalty lies more with Tsadok than with her now. It never seemed a particularly important distinction; they are on the same side, after all. She never imagined a situation like this. Will Elliwick be swayed by an appeal for the greater good? Dyr doesn’t know. She doesn’t, in the end, understand Elliwick as well as Tsadok does. She tries anyway.

“The army needs him,” she says. “The army needs him, and the war needs the army. You don’t need me.”

“Elliwick,” says Tsadok again. He goes to his knees, almost making it look like he’s just getting on eye level, but she can tell it’s a controlled fall. Something is beeping.

Dyr reaches for the oxygen tank, squinting through a haze of dizziness. At least she remembers to use her metal arm to get Tsadok’s breather, so she actually manages to unclip it.

Wait.

“Elliwick, listen,” she says. “You have to leave me, but take my arm when you go. It’s important.”

“You two are so dramatic,” Elliwick says. The last thing Dyr sees is her rolling her eyes.

 

  
She wakes up in her own bunk on the ship, awash in horror because if she’s alive that means-

“Tsadok’s fine,” says Asmun. “Elliwick said you’d- aah!”

Dyr pulls her into a fierce hug, almost toppling them both to the floor.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” she starts to say, but her voice breaks halfway through the explanation. Asmun’s arms come around her.

“Not this time,” she says, and she holds on while Dyr cries on her shoulder for a while, because she’s the best little sister and Dyr is never, ever giving her up.

When she lifts her head Elliwick is sitting in Skjaldi’s chair, holding a bottle of something that’s more nutrients than taste- Dyr would know, she’s the one who synthesized the stuff. 

“Sorry to intrude,” she says. Dyr wipes her face and takes the bottle.

“It’s okay,” she says. “No secrets on a ship this size.”

Elliwick shrugs uncomfortably, looks down and back. “Tsadok woke up a couple hours before you. Lyon was waiting to rendezvous with a shuttle, apparently there’s an emergency in M quadrant. He said to tell you he was sorry to go, but that he’d know when you were awake and okay.”

Elliwick watches her face carefully as she relays this. Dyr nods. She wonders if Elliwick knows about the gene-sense bond, and then, close on the heels of that thought, she wonders if Elliwick is in love with Tsadok. She hopes not, for Elliwick’s sake. Something gives her the impression that Tsadok is only ever going to have one bond like that, and she wouldn’t wish watching it from outside and wanting on anyone. (Now that the fog around her thoughts has cleared, she can read between the lines enough to have an understanding of Lyon. She tries not to pity him; it would probably make him hate her.)

“Oh, and you should let Asmun take a look at your arm, you seemed to think it was pretty important,” says Elliwick.

“I…did?”

“Yeah, you told me to leave you there but make sure to bring the arm back.”

Asmun kicks her. “You did what?”

“I honestly can’t remember, it’s all pretty hazy. But I guess it’s worth taking a look. Toolkit’s under the bed.”

“I know,” says Asmun, and ducks to get it, muttering. “Leave you and take the arm.”

“Overdramatic, right?” says Elliwick with a grin. That does sound familiar.

“Thank you, by the way,” Dyr tells her. “I know we both owe you our lives, again, though I’m afraid I’ve lost the details. What happened?”

“Nothing special, just dragged you both back to the skimmer and drove home,” says Elliwick, in that deadpan way she has when the lie is so outrageous that she doesn’t even bother trying to be convincing.

“That sounds…implausible,” says Asmun. Elliwick shrugs again.

“We’re trying to fight a war against a creeping entropy rainbow that eats brains, none of it sounds particularly plausible.” She gets up and goes to the door. “I’m glad you’re up, Dyr. Please stop coming up with new and inventive near-death experiences to try. Someday I won’t be able to get you out of them.”

The door whirrs shut behind her. Dyr trades a look with Asmun.

“She didn’t really drag you and Tsadok back to the skimmer, right?”

Dyr shakes her head. “Even if she could move us, there wasn’t enough oxygen.”

“So what do you think she did?”

“I have no idea,” Dyr says, and she mostly doesn’t, but she can’t get the terrible, aching chill of deep space out of her arm for days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is currently the last I have written of this story, but more chapters may be added at some point if inspiration strikes! Also, anyone else who wants to play in this universe in any way is welcome and encouraged to do so. :-)


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